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An Example Worth Repeating
At the crack of dawn the next morning, we got an early start on the road to visit El Portón, a smaller housing project about an hour past Marcovia.
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| Children stand in front of the school in El Portón. |
While the destruction in Tegus was graphic and easily accessible to international media crews, the challenge of surviving Mitch in isolated villages like El Portón was a lonely ordeal. I heard that 25 people had perched for three days without food on top of a bus as floodwaters roared around them. Others had climbed into trees in the schoolyard, remaining until rescued by men in boats. Even months later, getting to El Portón was slow going. Heavy rains the night before had flooded large stretches of the crater-filled dirt road.
The story of El Portón and its 40 families is an impressive one. In the wake of Mitch, being alive was about all they had to be thankful for. They lost all their possessions and depended on CARE for food and supplies. Most families lived for months in a CARE-managed shelter before reconstruction began.
From the shelter, José Jesus Ortíz, a soft-spoken schoolteacher, organized the families, wrote a proposal and acquired a land grant through the Honduran government for three acres of land located on a hillside. He said that the hurricane "has given all of us an opportunity to unite and work together with love for our neighbors."
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| People of El Portón work together to lay the building blocks for a house. |
After José contacted CARE to provide technical assistance and materials for housing construction, the people of El Portón immediately went to work building terraces and rock barriers up the hillside to prevent erosion.
On this day, houses were going up.
Throughout the 12-hour workday, I watched women carry cement blocks on their heads, toddlers bring water from a nearby well and men carefully build walls from the ground up -- smoothing cement between concrete blocks. They didn't use any power tools -- there's no electricity. They didn't have any large bucket trucks -- they used an oxen-drawn cart to haul loads of dirt. This was hard and sweaty work but I never heard anyone complain or ask for help.
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| José Jesus Ortíz carefully smoothes cement between concrete blocks. |
As José took a break from working on a house to go teach an elementary school class down the road, he said to me, "Fortunately, houses are easier to build than our lives."
While the people of El Portón know the road ahead won't be easy, with a lot of hard work, they are building something better than they had before the storm.
Working with communities like El Portón, CARE has been trying to convert Hurricane Mitch from a tragedy into a historic opportunity to improve people's lives. CARE seeks opportunities to focus not only on the people hardest hit by Mitch, but, just as it has for more than 40 years in Honduras, to continue taking a holistic approach to developing the poorest regions of Honduras.
Continue to Day 4
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